20 Years Later: Remembering Pan Am Flight 103

SYRACUSE, N.Y., Oct. 24, 2008 — -- It has been 20 years since 35 Syracuse University students lost their lives in the Pan Am Flight 103 crash that killed 270 people.

SU professor Lawrence Mason remembers the Lockerbie, Scotland, disaster as a "time of great desperation."

"You want to help but you don't think you can, you don't want to be in the way, but you want to try something," Mason said. "Everyone needed to let everyone know they were there for each other. But that didn't seem to be enough."

Mason taught eight of the students aboard the flight, two of whom he worked closely with. Since 1988 he has made 12 trips to the crash site.

During Mason's first trip in 1996, he looked for closure, peace and answers. He soon realized that there was more to Lockerbie than the plane crash. Now, more than a decade later, Mason has written a book about what he found: "Looking for Lockerbie," a story about the town and its people. The book will be available at the beginning of December.

"The fact is that the people who lived in Lockerbie had to find a way to put Pan Am 103 behind them and into the past. You can't spend the rest of your life grieving and mourning. You have to live your life. And the people who live there learned this lesson," Mason said.

The town's struggle parallels Mason's struggle to find closure. During one of his trips back, he had an experience that he said reaffirmed the importance of his book project and helped him find peace. He was standing in the field where the plane hit the ground, when he looked out past the crash site.

"There was a beautiful cottage, and a sharp rising hill, covered with sheep and it was raining, but at that moment the clouds parted, and a little beam of sunlight came down, hit the cottage and lit up the hillside for me," Mason said.

He said it was then that he felt a real connection with the two students he had known so well.

"What surprised me was that they didn't feel tortured to me, they felt at peace," he said. Mason later found out that the site he had photographed was where the two students' bodies were found.